Prior art systems found in many casinos subject to continuous (24 hour a day, seven day a week) operation have the disadvantage that they must be taken out of service to refill hoppers when the hoppers run low on coins. Machines might also be taken out of service to perform any necessary periodic accounting. In some jurisdictions, the coin inventory in each machine must be taken at regular intervals. Because the revenue generated by a machine is related to the amount of time it is being played, taking a machine out of service when it is being played, especially when the current player is non a "hot streak", results in loss of revenue.
Another problem with previous slot machines is that because casinos deal with large amounts of cash, they are subject to theft by dishonest persons and are particularly vulnerable to theft by dishonest employees. If so inclined, a dishonest technician can take a few coins from each casino slot machine as it is serviced. Although the shortages over time multiplied by many technicians can be quite large, since each individual take is so small, casinos have resigned themselves to being shorted and treat the thefts as a cost of doing business. Casinos have tried to combat this problem by assigning two or more technicians to each task requiring an open gaming machine. However, this leads to additional labor costs and doesn't help if each of the assigned technicians is dishonest.
An alternate solution is to seal the coin or bill reservoir so that only trusted money-handling employees working in a cashier's cage can get to the coins or bills. Coin hoppers are more difficult to seal than bill acceptors because coin hoppers have to give out coins as well as receive them, whereas bill acceptors simply store the bills, and because coins are more likely to jam a hopper than pliable bills. If jamming was not a concern, then the hoppers could be sealed. However, where jamming is a possibility, sealing the hoppers might result in greater down-time for the gaming machines, which is a loss to the casinos which can be greater than the theft loss.
The hopper must be occasionally opened to refill with coins after a jackpot is hit and thus is not readily amenable to being sealed. Even if the hopper were sealed, it would not prevent a coin loader from removing some coins from the load of coins being added to the hopper.
As should be apparent after reading the above, merely counting coins as they go into the hopper and counting coins as they leave the hopper would not prevent theft, as a physical inventory would only indicate that coins are missing, not who took them.
Prior art systems exist for weighing coins to count the coins, and many such devices might be used in a money room of a casino. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,193,629 issued to Lare and U.S. Pat. No. 4,512,428 issued to Bullivant describe apparatus for weighing coins. While such weighing devices might be suitable for weighing coins in a money room, it is unsuitable in a gaming machine environment, where the hoppers must be enclosed to prevent theft by players, as well as being remotely accessible, operable in an electrically noisy and vibration-prone environment and able to detect theft at the time of the theft.
From the above it is seen that an improved method and apparatus for filling hoppers, coin accounting and theft prevention is needed.